Yahoo!’s Domainapalooza
Yahoo has decided to release some of its premium domain names to the public through an auction at Sedo…
Yahoo!’s Domainapalooza …(This link was updated on November 16th, 2013)
This premium domain name portfolio auction started today, November 14th, and runs to November 21st, 2013. Although there are quite a few names that I feel are not very good (especially for the reserve price indicated), there are some great domains in the bunch…
- AV.com
- WebServer.com
- Sandwich.com
- Sled.com
- VoiceMail.com
- Crackers.com
- Freeby.com/.net
- BlogsPort.com (or brand it as BlogSport.com)
Now, please note that the above is merely a sampling of some of the best domain names in the Yahoo Domainapalooza premium domain portfolio auction. But that portfolio is listing over 500 names on its first day, and Yahoo! also indicates that it will also be adding even more domain names throughout the auction.
Can you walk away with a great brandable domain name that you could develop into a profitable website or business? Very likely, considering the quality of some of these names. Especially with names that have an excellent second meaning. For instance, even though winter is coming and sled would make a great name to sell winter snow sleds, “sled” is often how I refer to older muscle cars that had great power but lacked the handling of a sports car. These beasts will never have sports car handling because they double as grocery-getters and transportation to work. And if you are into muscle cars like I am you would see the opportunity in that street rod slang name.
As of this writing, there are 517 domain names available for auction and with Yahoo planning to add even more this may become the most watched premium domain name portfolio auction in history.
Happy domaining! I hope there will be many domainers taking advantage of this opportunity to add to their portfolio and domainate the market with domainating names. 😉
Yahoo!’s Domainapalooza …(This link was updated on November 16th, 2013)
-Doug
…”Domainating”
(I’m going back to check out that list!)
Why FF4 is so Slow
After Twittering that FireFox 4 was incredibly slow I was met with disbelief on Twitter and elsewhere that I mentioned it. I was told how fast FF4 is, now.
I seriously do not like FireFox because it was so pathetically slow and because it ignores good user interface experience strategies. I was actually baffled how anyone would think that the thing was any faster, as it was so slow that it nearly crashed my Asus EeePC netbook.
Well, I finally fired-up that little Windows 7 netbook again yesterday and discovered what the problem is. FF4 is allowing multiple and simultaneous video streams to run all at once. What? C’MON MAN! Who the hell designs anything with multiple active video streams on the same page?
To further complicate this issue, FireFox 4 is allowing these simultaneous video streams to run even though the page it is loading isn’t active. Huh? C’MON MAN! That is uncalled for.
Why would anyone want to load multiple pages at the same time, you may ask? Why not? If you are loading a page from an African web host (which have notoriously slow connections), you may load another website in another tab while you are waiting for the African website to load over seemingly slow dial-up speeds.
This isn’t even close to being every case. I am a webmaster, a hostmaster and a web designer. As a part of my daily duties I like to insure that my sites, as well as my client’s sites, are loading as expected each day. So my “Home” page button is a collection of all the sites I have to check. I need to ensure that the various hosting solutions I am offering are performing well, that my websites are loading quickly and correctly, that my sites have not been hacked, that the system is working correctly for myself & my clientel.
As it happens, a variety of those websites each have video on them, and as a part of the marketing it loads and plays by default. Anyone may pause the play. And until FF4, only one of these sites were streaming video when the web page they reside on wasn’t active (in focus).
But FireFox 4 has changed all that. And because FF4 is loading all these different video streams in the background, the browser slows to a crawl. As I press buttons, maybe something will happen, eventually. The user interface is nearly useless. The multiple videos that are playing are completely broken-up as the system races to deliver all the data, including those out-of-focus video streams on tabs that aren’t even viewable. And it runs every single video stream as if they all needed to be run at the same time.
C’MON MAN!
As designers we can do much better jobs of designing apps that work. The user is robbed of any ability to navigate. The video stream is corrupted, the user experience is destroyed through excessive stupidity in implementation.
C’MON MOZILLA! Get your head out of its ass.
The Contradiction of Search and the PPC Advertising Business Model
This post is a response to the article “Bing Now a Serious Challenger to Google” by Jeff Bertolucci, PC World
One should probably read this article in order to understand the inspiration for this post, though it isn’t absolutely necessary. The links in this post open in a new window so that you won’t lose your focus here and can get back to this post easily (aren’t I a nice guy?).
Bing can actually be a boon to website designers & developers & teams of whom work together because unlike Google that does not penalize for poorly coded websites, it was reported that Live dropped pages that were improperly coded.
I have already made the argument that good web coding should be rewarded by the search engines in my blog. I am not asking for awards from the search engines, but it makes sense to me that since a website represents the actual soul of someone’s marketing message, bad code should indicate a very poor marketing effort while professionally done, tight, clean code should be rewarded as such. And I also emphasize that reducing the ranking ability of tables based layouts should be the very first consideration in establishing that part (of the formula) in the ranking algorithm.
I twittered this previous post to @mattcutts, who is in charge of Google’s Web Spam Department, twice yesterday and yet never received a response from him. I suppose he gets a bunch of such posts from many being in his position, but I have also seen him respond to such posts, as well.
Matt Cutts has previously indicated that he believed that since the browser may not have had any issues with the underlying code, even if the code was poorly done, no web page was ever penalized for having poor coding practices. However, this seems to ignore the fact that the worldwide web has become a commercial entity, and that any individual website presence represents the full resources which have been brought to bear for online marketing as a public and professional presence on behalf of a company or person. Even if a free personal homepage, a web page exists to promote something, even if it is just information. The sharing of it also helps promote that page’s authority and therefore its presence (possibly indirectly, but usually not).
Let’s face it, the internet is no longer free or even publicly available to all. It is a goldmine and a company that can leverage itself as an effective online resource can prosper if marketed smart and promoted effectively.
The key here then, is the fact that Google is ignoring the commercialization of the worldwide web (aka: the w3) despite its monopolistic dominance of the Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising industry. This means that a company has no influence based on merit and drives the need for recognition through advertising in order to be noticed.
This same monopolistic attitude is seen in Matt Cutt’s attitude towards paid links. Even though a paid link represents a measurable online marketing effort by a company or individual, he frowns on them as a purposeful and deliberate means of influencing the search engines. But that is a protectionist attitude and monopolistic argument, because it is Google’s own algorithm itself that is tallying up direct links as votes for a website, not the marketer.
And since Matt Cutts has warned us that Google may penalize websites in the future, I will tell you that I have personal knowledge of and experienced the fact that Google is now, already started penalizing websites that display suspected paid links. This is now a known fact based on the performance of a number of my websites which are utilizing free web hosting where paid links are employed in order to offset hosting cost, and also proven by the fact that you can report paid links to Google (as proof, simply check out Google’s “Webmaster Tools” which expedites such reporting by offering a very prominent link to do so). My web traffic is now negligible and the PR (PR stands for Google’s “PageRank” system or ranking a site from 1-10) is non-existent at almost all these sites. Although all of these sites are new, they had been previously gaining traffic and growing in unique visits. A few had a PR of 2 or 3 and most of the rest were at a PR of at l. There were a few PR 0 sites too, but now most are not even acknowledged by Google’s PR system. They are all CSS design based WordPress sites. They all include unique content.
In effect, as a monopoly, Google is trying to funnel any and all advertising sales through it’s own PPC (or Pay-Per-Click, as in paid advertisements) marketing program. Most people I speak to that are marketing their business themselves and are aware of Google’s “Do not buy links” policy are actually afraid to advertise anywhere else.
The stunning idiotic result from an otherwise very smart and successful internet marketing entity known as Google is that no one there sees this contradicting business model as pure monopolistic. This is a business model which is excessively slanted in its own favor and the end result is highly unbalanced and completely unfair, especially to individuals, professionals, small to medium businesses and any business that is starting up. Because Google sells links and tells everyone not to buy links.
In other words, Google’s business model suggests that only corporations should consider playing because demonstrated effort and merit through efficient and clean professional code which it spiders on a regular basis has nothing to say or add to a company’s online marketing effort. And this is completely opposite of how Google should monitor marketing and effective online presence building.
Furthermore, instead of simply influencing marketing channels, Google is using protectionism in order to dominate advertising via its monopolistic presence. The end result is a message which tells every webmaster and online marketer, “Play it our way and play with us or die.”
Nothing is more contradictory than Google’s advertisement and PPC marketing model if it is actually a serious search engine. And we all know it is the largest. But it is now ignoring the webmaster’s efforts in clean and efficient CSS structured and styled, properly coded (X)HTML web pages.
Quite simply, the PPC advertising model is extremely flawed because it relies on a corporation’s ability to play by pouring in gobs of money to secure the top positions with the top bids. Even though there is a little wiggle room allowed for effective advertising copy (monitored through click-throughs), the end result is that in order to secure the top ads, the price of the advertised product has to support the bid, which makes end-sold products and/or services inherently higher.
One can argue that Frugal is a great alternative to advertising, but Frugal, which promotes low prices and coupons, is not even close to effectively marketed anywhere on the web but at Google. With Google AdWords, you have the ability to build a woldwide presence instantly for a product, service and/or brand through Google’s content network, and each ad placement is in direct competition with the crux of web content found on each individual page, so users/readers/viewers have already demonstrate an active interested in that type of service/product/brand. Google offers no such alternative with Frugal, nor does it effectively promote Frugal because it is not in the interest of its business model. Google only uses Frugal in order to offer an argument against clear protectionist intent and related issues.
Long way to go to make a point that hasn’t been made yet, isn’t it? That’s right, I still haven’t gotten to the point, all these facts mere lead-up to the idea that… [deep breath]… if any decent search engine (with a significant presence) actually allies with the web designer/developer/studio to provide truly relevant results based on the seriousness of a company’s marketing effort by rewarding the effort, consistency and merit of professionalism which is demonstrated in the effectiveness of the code which a bot has to crawl and cache any damn way, I am sure that would go an enormously long way in allowing web design/development professionals the recognition they deserve.
But Google’s contradictory business model turns it all upside down. It wants to see your links and tallies them to help establish your PageRank and this same tally (not the PageRank, but that link tally) also influences your ranking in the search engine results in some significant way through its algorithym. It monitors your presence and influence on the web, but it sees paid direct links as spam. It presently and demonstratedly marks sites with reported paid links as spam and stops sending them traffic through its search resources, even though Google is in the actual business of selling links itself, and just because they are indirect pointers to pages that is so-called different (and yet it is still advertising, still paid links). In order to play, one has to pay Google, driving up product/service costs because Google’s AdWords model is self-corrupting. And Google continues to scare us into using their PPC ad services. People and businesses have been broken or made on their understanding and use of this queer system, both through PPC ads and the actual search results.
Why anyone else wouldn’t take advantage of the inherent corruption and contradiction of Google’s business model is beyond me. Remember in fact that this is how Google started, promising an alliance with webmasters to produce effective search with relevant results. This is what drew us all in. And if webmasters saw a true benefit from providing clean code, they would. But the fact is that Google only cares about content, not marketing (unless it is its own), not professionalism in presentation in the one way it could absolutely and logically measure it.
So in the end analysis leads to only one conclusion for me, this is an opportunity crying to be taken advantage of. Bing may not be the one with the balls to do it. It, after all has been a consistent follower in the business of the internet. It didn’t even get it, at first, and almost missed the boat completely. But Bing does represent an expression of a search for new ideas. And yet, Microsoft has historically not embraced innovation in the same way that IBM snubbed Microsoft’s innovation. It is old and Microsoft has clearly never lead the industry in any sort of innovation with the internet because it suffers from the same old conservative snobby old boys network attitude that IBM scoffed at. Microsoft just doesn’t understand the new generation and the digital age.
But, in the same way, Google is doing the exact same thing. It has forgotten its alliance with webmasters and web professionals. Google now inhibits business through the same lack of understanding in the unfairness of its business model.
Which actually leaves the door wide open for a new player. Yahoo is, after all, primarily a portal, is branded as such, and is ever abandoning any of its efforts in search because it refuses to innovate.
Anyone want to start a search engine? The sky is literally the limit. It should embrace net socialization, all forms of web media, localization and news. Without utilizing a business unfriendly contradictory business model. No one does that, and it would be easy to do effectively. But that’s another post for another time. 😀
By the way, can anyone reach the present that Google left me? It’s dead-center in the middle of my back. Actually, it’s not that bad. The percentage of websites I have on free web hosting is not very significant, so the blade is tiny. But I was one of those webmasters that jumped on the Google bandwagon, so the betrayal does sting.
My code has evolved, but Google refuses to evolve their search and refuses to acknowledge superior design code. That said, so does every other search engine. Because they all are on the PPC marketing kick, too. But Google and I had a thing going. Actually, we still do, breaking-up is hard to do no matter how much a loved one may abuse you.
You know?
…………………………………
Associated Reference Links:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/181980/bing_now_a_serious_challenger_to_google.html
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
Soo-Foo.com Sold
I finally received my $600.0o check from Network Solutions’ Certified Offer Service for the sale of Soo-Foo.com, yesterday. I had been awaiting this payment for quite some time and the whole transaction was mired with delays. I am certainly glad to have finally received this payment, although I now know to charge more per sale if I ever get a an offer through this service ever again. Although NetSol offered me $600.00 and paid me exactly $600.00 for Soo-Foo.com, this sale was well over a month in the making and once the transfer of the domain name had been completed and verified, it still took over 10 days for them to process the payment, issue a check and for me to receive it. Heck, I had it transferred over to NetSol within 5 days.
The main problem is that NetSol only looks after itself, not its customers. They use every trick in the book in order to screw their clients. Once the transfer is complete and verified, the payment is authorized for processing. Except even then, once the transfer has been completed and verified by Friday, the payment isn’t actually issued until the checks are printed the following week, on Thursday. Talk about a racket, NetSol has purposely structured everything in order to give everyone else the shaft. Obviously no one gets their check until next week, so NetSol is sitting on this payment an unusually long time before the funds are ever deducted from their bank account.
Every other domain name broker or sales service is paying the seller immediately upon a successful transfer verification through PayPal or the user’s set payment method. That means that I would be paid on the very same day, anywhere else. It just shows what an evil attitude NetSol uses in conducting business. They really have no sense of fairplay at all.
Note also that Network Solutions uses the very same contract for every single one of its customers. The same contract covers domain name sales of any type, and is extended to be overly and dramatically long to cover the specifics of each and every domain name extension, and all other legal speak, as well. It also covers its web hosting, design services, along with anything and everything else it could ever thing of selling or taking commissions on. The contract itself is a breach of contract by its very design as a way to buck the first law of business, because it fails to constitute any attempt to do business fairly by any stretch of the imagination. NetSol’s conglomerated contract is unrealistic to any consumer, or anyone else that NetSol does business with, and is purposely meant to create confusion and make the reader give-up on making sense of the crap.
Obviously, NetSol hasn’t changed. It’s this crappy “holier-than-thou” corporate law attitude with virtually no support and complete lack of social responsibility that made me become my own domain name registrar at Domain Hostmaster. Unlike NetSol, we take pride in delivering extremely low prices and offering full customer tech support on any issue. But NetSol continues doing whatever they want on the mere basis that they control the registry, which of course is their primary business (and probably why NetSol so flagrantly abuses its human customer relationships).
I am sure that the buyer was happy, as whoever it was messed-up in the first attempt to purchase the domain at the agreed upon price after the first month was up and hadn’t sent the required FAX that NetSol’s Certified Offer Service was looking for, and I did not quibble about the price once they re-initiated a contract for sale after the previous offer and contract had expired.
I have made a mistake, though. I deleted the sales listing for Soo-Foo.com from my Sedo account. I should have just set it as ‘not for sale’ because the new owner still hasn’t changed the name servers for the domain. That means that any PPC funds the domain produces using the old name servers set for Sedo will be lost to me since I can not add the domain name again as I won’t be able to be verified as the owner.
The new owner might be able to recover those funds if he/she signs-up at Sedo, though. But probably won’t if he/she/they wouldn’t even bother trying to purchase the name through Sedo, originally. Or maybe the buyer hasn’t actually taken possession of the name yet and it is still sitting in NetSol’s escrow account. That would figure.
Despite NetSol’s attempt to treat anyone as badly as possible in order to leverage all advantages to itself, the sale of Soo-Foo.com did go through and I am happy with the outcome. But I am not happy with the process as noted above, but that isn’t even the full story. After acknowledging the successful transfer of the domain name to their transfer holding account in one email, the Certified Offer Service sent another email indicating that the transfer was unsuccessful and the sale was stopped. This was obviously a hick-up in their system programming, but it is truly an enormous problem. Why the heck can’t this giant corporate player get simple domain name transfer monitoring programmed correctly?
To top that off, upon receiving the first email saying that the transfer to their specified holding account was verified early in the day on Friday, that second email indicating that the transfer had failed and therefore the sale halted came late in the day on Friday and I did not see it until after the close of business. Of course I wrote back, strongly objecting to their apparent failure to fulfill their contract of sale and threatening legal action if they did not complete the transaction. And of course, since it was the weekend I did not expect a reply until the next week. But I didn’t even get that reply on the following Monday. It was late on Tuesday before I heard an apology for their mistake. I can’t believe how unprofessional they are.
Thank God I have setup Domain Hostmaster, because as a Domainer I require great honest support available 24/7 at the kinds of competitive prices that anyone can afford along with all those free extras I include in every package. And yes, I am my own best customer. 😉
By the way, what does “Soo-Foo” mean, you may ask? That is the nickname for the city of Sioux Falls (pronounced Soo Fahls), where I live. So I did have some designs on that domain name, myself. Luckily, I have a couple of other options for local area branding solutions that are still in my possession. 😀
Why are Lugnut Caps so Hard to Find?
It seems like all the automakers lose the details. I’d like to buy a few. Can’t find them anywhere when I’m looking.
If you have a supply of those litttle black GM lugnut caps, please get ahold of me. I also bought the lugnutcap.com & lugnutcaps.com domains if you would you would like an affiliate for used, oem or aftermarket sales.
I’d also be interested in hearing from custom lugnut cover manufacturers and designers. 😉
-Doug
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